The Wall Street Journal reports:

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has spent months investigating the results of the 2020 election that Donald Trump lost, according to White House officials, a role that took her to a related FBI search of an election center in Georgia on Wednesday.

Gabbard is leading the administration’s effort to re-examine the election and look for potential crimes, a priority for the president, the officials said.

The national intelligence director is usually focused on ensuring the president has the best intelligence available to make national-security decisions. Gabbard has been sidelined from some of those deliberations, including the Venezuela operation earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

She has begun studying information about voting machines, analyzed data from swing states and pursued theories that President Trump has promoted to claim the 2020 election was unfairly taken from him, the officials said, particularly on foreign government interference.

She has regularly briefed Trump and chief of staff Susie Wiles about her inquiry in recent months along with others involved in the investigation. Those include senior Justice Department officials, Trump’s outside ally and lawyer Cleta Mitchell and Kurt Olsen, a lawyer who pushed claims in 2020 that the election was stolen and joined the administration as a special government employee.

Gabbard has consulted with others in the intelligence community about claims of foreign interference in the 2020 election, the officials said, though she hasn’t provided the public with new evidence of it.

She is expected to prepare a report on her work, the people said. The administration has discussed executive orders on voting ahead of the midterm elections, two of the officials said.

Cybersecurity specialists, elections experts and many former top security officials who worked for Trump during his first term have maintained for years that there was no evidence of widespread tampering or fraud in the 2020 contest. [Continue reading…]

Kareem Rifai writes:

In the final hours before the U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, President Trump was surrounded by a cadre of trusted advisers — with one noteworthy absence.

Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, was doing sun salutations on a beach in Hawaii. She had been routinely excluded from Venezuela operational planning for so long, in fact, that White House aides reportedly joked that “DNI” really stands for “Do Not Invite.”

Gabbard’s exclusion may stem from her extensive history of opposing a hardline policy against the Maduro dictatorship, once writing that intervention would “wreak death and destruction on the Venezuelan people.” While the final death toll of the operation is still uncertain, assessments have found that fewer than 100 people died, of which a plurality were Cuban security personnel.

This raises a fundamental question: If the Trump administration does not trust its own Director of National Intelligence with a highly sensitive and crucial operation, how can the American people — or, for that matter, America’s intelligence-sharing partners? [Continue reading…]